Rate My Professor Ralph Adler

Emeritus Professor Ralph Adler holds the position of Professor Emeritus in the Department of Accountancy and Finance within the Otago Business School at the University of Otago. He earned a BA from Colgate University, an MBA from Duke University, a PhD from the State University of New York at Albany, and holds professional qualifications CPA (AICPA) and CA (NZICA). Prior to joining the University of Otago in 1991, Adler spent ten years in the United States working as a CPA and business consultant. At Otago, he served as Director of the Otago Centre for Organisational Performance Measurement and Management (COPMM) and as Convenor of the Performance Measurement Association of Australasia (PMAA). With over 35 years of teaching experience at undergraduate and graduate levels, he has significantly influenced management accounting education.

Adler's research interests encompass performance management, strategic management accounting, organisational effectiveness, and active student learning. He has produced over 100 publications, including academic papers, practitioner articles, business case studies, and two books: Management Accounting: Making it World Class and Strategic Performance Management: Accounting for Organisational Control. Key recent works include 'Accounting Professionalism: Serving the Public Interest Means First Serving Accounting Students' (2025, Accounting & Finance), 'Performance Evaluation of Academics: A Social Influence Theory Perspective' (2024, Accounting & Finance), 'Accounting for Waste Management: A Study of the Reporting Practices of the Top Listed Indian Companies' (2022, Accounting & Finance), and 'Creating a Modified Monopoly Game for Promoting Students’ Higher-Order Thinking Skills and Knowledge Retention' (2021, Issues in Accounting Education). His scholarship has attracted 5,776 citations on Google Scholar. Adler recently retired as Senior Associate Editor of Accounting Education and serves on editorial boards of Australian Accounting Review, Asia Pacific Management Accounting Journal, International Review of Banking and Financial Studies, Journal of Risk and Financial Management, Pacific Accounting Review, and Regional Formation and Development Studies. Honors include Fellow of Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand (2016), Coopers and Lybrand Peter Barr Fellowship, American Chamber of Commerce Business Education Fellowship, and multiple best paper awards. A 2014 study by Delande et al. ranked him as New Zealand's leading accounting education publisher and fifth globally.